Photo: Peter Baba

The NBA filed a motion late Friday to dismiss Warner Bros. Discovery’s lawsuit, which claims the league breached its contract by rejecting WBD’s matching offer for a new media rights deal in favor of Amazon. The NBA’s 28-page filing requests the court to dismiss the case with prejudice, preventing it from being refiled.

“TBS chose not to match NBCUniversal’s offer, which would have enabled TBS to continue distributing games via its TNT linear cable network,” the league wrote. “Instead, TBS purported to match the less-expensive Amazon offer, but only after revising it to include traditional distribution rights and making numerous other substantive changes.”

Amazon’s offer was about $1.8 billion annually, while NBC’s was around $2.45 billion yearly.

The league said that Warner Bros. Discovery “made substantive revisions to eight of the Amazon offer’s 27 sections (including revisions to 22 different subsections), changed 11 defined terms that are collectively used roughly 100 separate times, struck nearly 300 words, and added over 270 new words, substantially altering the parties’ rights and obligations in the process.”

NBA’s lawyers went on, arguing, “Far from accepting each term of Amazon’s offer, TBS’s revisions constituted a counteroffer that the NBA was free to reject.”